Tuesday, 16 April 2013

Measles. The Moral Panic in Swansea?

The outbreak of Measles in Swansea this month (April 2013) has led to a moral panic that has been extraordinary to watch.

First, Measles has been with us for a very long time. It was first described in the 7th century, and eventually differentiated from Smallpox and Chickenpox, in the 10th century. It has been estimated that 220 million people had died from the disease, and this kind of data forms the basis of the modern day ‘scare’ stories that so often hit the headlines today. This outbreak of measles is quite typical of this. It is a panic created by a disease that the BMJ know is no longer a serious, killer illness.

Indeed, the BMJ knew this as long ago as 1959 (7th February, p354), where they speak about the large number of cases recorded in England and Wales (41,000 compared with under 1,000 in Swansea). They asked doctors to comment on Measles and concluded that

"these writer agree that measles is nowadays normally a mild infection, and they rarely have occasion to give prophylactic gamma globulin".

The reality is, now as then, that although most children will contract measles during their lifetime, for most healthy people it is a disease that the body deals with quite normally, and without complications. It has, however, always been a 'killer' disease to those living in poverty, in poor, damp housing, with a poor diet. This is why the death rates rose so rapidly during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions of the late 18th, early 19th centuries. And it is why, following the increasing affluence of the Victorian era, alongside the urban public health measure that were introduced, the disease has been on a steady decline.

"The combined death rate of scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, and measles among children up to fifteen shows that nearly 90 per cent of the total decline in mortality between 1860 and 1965 had occurred before the introduction of antibiotics and widespread immunization. In part this recession may be attributed to improved housing and to a decrease in the virulence of micro-organisms, but by far the most important factor was a higher host-resistance due to better nutrition. In poor countries today, diarrhoea and upper-respiratory-tract infections occur more frequently, last longer, and lead to higher mortality where nutrition is poor, no matter how much or how little medical care in available". Illich.

Illich wrote this in 1975 - but the idea that conventional Medicine has cured Measles persists, largely owing to the success of its brilliant, self-congratulatory propaganda over recent years.

Listen to the conventional medical establishment, however, and you will be led to believe that it has been antibiotics and vaccines have achieved this result. They have not. The graph shows, quite clearly, that the decline of measles as a 'killer' disease has been consistent over the decades, and the introduction of antibiotics or vaccines have played no visible role in this decline whatsoever.

So why has Measles become a more serious disease over the last few decades, and certainly since 1959 - a time when mother's organised measles parties in order to ensure that their children contracted it naturally? Has it, perhaps, something to do with the promotion of the MMR vaccine?

Certainly, the purposeful generation of fear in Swansea has been something that the NHS, with the supine support of the mainstream media (led, as always by the BBC, compliant as always to the wishes of the Conventional Medical Establishment) has created.

We are told that those people contracting measles are those who have not been vaccinated in the late 1990's, largely owing to that 'awful' doctor, Andrew Wakefield, who had the audacity to suggest that the MMR vaccines might be dangerous! These children should get vaccinated as soon as possible, to protect themselves from this dreadful disease!

Yet measles is not 'dreadful'. And the MMR vaccine is not safe. So the NHS are telling us to take a medication that is dangerous to prevent an illness that is not serious.

Even the alleged cause of the outbreak in Swansea is far from certain. We have been told that it has arisen from too many children not being vaccinated in the late 1990's. Is this really the case? If so, where are the statistics? Where are the children, aged 13 and just below, who have contracted the disease? We must patiently await the statistics that will ultimately emerge.

The evidence about outbreaks of disease, like this one at Swansea, have hitherto shown that it is the vaccinated, and not the unvaccinated that have been more likely to contract the disease. See, for example, the following links.

If my hunch is correct, the Swansea episode has been another example of a health scare, a panic created in order to sell more drugs and vaccines. If so, the Department of Health, the NHS, our GP's, and our national media, have all been complicit in yet another marketing exercise in favour of the Big Pharma drug companies.